particle system with particles that conform to surface
The obvious answer would be to use the hair simulation.

Create a hair emitter object an empty forcefield object and a sphere collision object.
On the hair emitter decrease gravity to 0, enable hair dynamics with a large step size (like 20+).

Place the empty with the forcefield and your sphere with collision enabled within the emitter object.

On the hair emitter hit "bake" in the hair dynamics tab. Like 20 frames should do for the particles to settle around the collision object.

You should get something like this:



Now just tweak the hair length and strand thickness and select a shader.
Done